Ted Cruz is the Republican establishment candidate. That’s absolutely insane.

If I told you at the start of the 2016 race that Mitt Romney would vote for Ted Cruz in the Utah caucuses and that Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham would endorse the Texas senator's presidential campaign, you would have laughed. Probably loudly.

Cruz was -- and is -- hated by the Republican Party establishment, who view him as a grandstander with little interest in any of the niceties of politics. Cruz is the guy who doesn't play well with others, and who others dislike -- a lot -- for that unwillingness to go along to get along.

And yet, here we are. All of those things have come to pass with Bush's endorsement -- he called Cruz a "consistent, principled conservative" in a Facebook post Wednesday morning -- the latest domino to fall. What is now beyond dispute is that Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington Republican circles, is the establishment GOP candidate in the presidential race. As Cruz put it this morning in an appearance on CNN: "If you think about it, in the last 10 days we've been endorsed by Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Mike Lee and Mark Levin. I mean, you want to talk about a broad coalition [that is] ideologically diverse? That covers the entire spectrum of the Republican Party."

If you told me a year ago that Donald Trump would be the front-runner for the Republican nomination, I would have been surprised. Maybe very surprised. But, I would have likely been able to see a path for how Trump got there -- capitalizing on the anger in the electorate and the strong desire to elect a true outsider. If you told me a year ago that Ted Cruz would be the establishment Republican pick in the race, I wouldn't have believed you. There was simply no way that I could conceptualize how that might occur. None.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/23/ted-cruz-is-the-republican-establishment-candidate-thats-absolutely-insane/